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Discovering Information Propagation Patterns in Microblogging Services

Published: 22 July 2015 Publication History

Abstract

During the last decade, microblog has become an important social networking service with billions of users all over the world, acting as a novel and efficient platform for the creation and dissemination of real-time information. Modeling and revealing the information propagation patterns in microblogging services cannot only lead to more accurate understanding of user behaviors and provide insights into the underlying sociology, but also enable useful applications such as trending prediction, recommendation and filtering, spam detection and viral marketing. In this article, we aim to reveal the information propagation patterns in Sina Weibo, the biggest microblogging service in China. First, the cascade of each message is represented as a tree based on its retweeting process. Afterwards, we divide the information propagation pattern into two levels, that is, the macro level and the micro level. On one hand, the macro propagation patterns refer to general propagation modes that are extracted by grouping propagation trees based on hierarchical clustering. On the other hand, the micro propagation patterns are frequent information flow patterns that are discovered using tree-based mining techniques. Experimental results show that several interesting patterns are extracted, such as popular message propagation, artificial propagation, and typical information flows between different types of users.

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      cover image ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
      ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data  Volume 10, Issue 1
      July 2015
      321 pages
      ISSN:1556-4681
      EISSN:1556-472X
      DOI:10.1145/2808688
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 22 July 2015
      Accepted: 01 March 2015
      Revised: 01 November 2014
      Received: 01 June 2014
      Published in TKDD Volume 10, Issue 1

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      Author Tags

      1. Information propagation pattern
      2. message cascade
      3. microblogging services
      4. propagation tree

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      Funding Sources

      • the National Basic Research Program of China
      • the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education
      • the National Natural Science Foundation of China
      • the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University

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